


That Which Can Be Decided

by JaxtonsTrash



Category: Mushishi
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Here i am again writing about deep longing and yearning, M/M, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, are we even surprised at this point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:22:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26176402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaxtonsTrash/pseuds/JaxtonsTrash
Summary: Adashino is seven when he realises it, standing with his feet in the spray of the surf, a shell clutched in one hand and a stick in the other. Laughter rings around him, his friends run by and spray sand and foam and dirt as they chase each other in circles, and all he can do is stand and stare out into the water.He’s completely bare.Perhaps love is something once can choose, he considers, and perhaps its shape need not be human. But in the spaces of the stars and the darkest nights, the doctor wishes someone might choose him back.AU: Where an image of something important to your soulmate marks your skin
Relationships: Adashino & Ginko (Mushishi), Adashino/Ginko (Mushishi)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	That Which Can Be Decided

**Author's Note:**

> hello it's me once again projecting into my fic. I'm constantly fixated on the idea of twin souls, of tenderness and yearning etc etc someone tell me to shut up.

Adashino is seven when he realises it, standing with his feet in the spray of the surf, a shell clutched in one hand and a stick in the other. Laughter rings around him, his friends run by and spray sand and foam and dirt as they chase each other in circles, and all he can do is stand and stare out into the water.

He’s completely bare.

He stares at his friends, the motions they make as their limbs move and they roll and tumble and trip into the water, screeching and bearing teeth, hair askew and clothes rumpled, and he feels himself begin to shake. His eyes trace blurring patterns on their skin, patterns like tattoos but made from something that ran much deeper than he might ever know.

He hates the feeling in his chest, the way it chews away at his insides. He’s too young to understand what the feeling is, but he knows it’s wrong in all the ways it shouldn’t be. 

Adashino drops his trinkets and stalks back home, shaking, wondering why the sudden realisation of it hurts him so deeply.

🌿

He’s eleven when someone else asks, a neighbour, curious as the pair sit knitting together broken netting. “What does it feel like, to not have a mark?”

 _Yuko_ , he thinks, _her name is Yuko._ He knows her name from those who call after her, laughing, inviting her to play while Adashino stands alone. And yet they both sit together doing chores all the same, as though the rest of the world is no longer there and they remain only as equals.

He blinks up at her, wondering if he should tell her the truth. She wears her own soulmark like a banner, the cut of her yukata folded just low enough to show a black image, a stalk of rice, bourne on her collar. He flinches as he traces it with his eyes, jealousy curling in his chest.

“It’s none of your business,” Adashino tells her, and keeps tying pieces of cord together. His fingers sting and shake.

“You just seem so lonely,” Yuko says, voice low, and from the corner of his eyes Adashino sees her shoulders sink. "You don’t have to be, just because you’re bare. Sometimes love can be made, you know, chosen.”

He wants to laugh, but the sound gets stuck in his throat. “That’s not your business, either.”

She smiles at him, a soft twitch of her lips. “No, but I’d like it to be. Can we be friends?”

🌿

At seventeen, a part of him breaks. He lets it, giving it away, lighting a lantern and setting it off to sea in the early hours of the spring dawn. He decides he has to send it away before it eats him alive, takes what little he feels he has left in his heart for ransom.

He watches others come and go, matches found and kept as the precious things they are, all while he stands by himself. He knows now how he’s broken, his skin is bare and his heart is empty, and it shows for all the world to see in all the blank spaces of his body.

Yuko once stood with him, held his hand, told him it shouldn’t matter. That he might decide things for himself, that the whole world was before him and all he had to do was accept it. And yet, as Adashino lets the early tide sink between his toes, he forgets what it was like to hold her hand and be content with the words she spoke.

There had been dawns she may have watched with him, but in the winter Yuko had met a young man from the fields to the west with the image of a small teacup inscribed on his left calf. Yuko had cried, had held the stranger close, and then had brought him home to serve him tea in the very same cup he wore on his skin.

She’d told Adashino the next afternoon, and he’d forced himself to smile. He thought about how he’d given the teacup to her, two years previous, finding its European shape curious and the pattern on it similar to the one on her favourite yukata. He thought about all the times he’d seen it in her room, holding shells, displaying those things small but precious and how she’d shown him each one with care. But instead of speaking so, he congratulates her on the man she’d met, how well they must be matched, and promises her he’d come by to meet him later. 

He leaves his village before summer begins.

🌿

He finds an apprenticeship for himself in the city, he works without sleeping until ceilings blur into walls, until the sky bleeds into the tops of buildings. Years pass and he loses count of names and faces and the days behind him and those that remain still before him. He mills about in the city, threading through thousands and thousands of people and feeling just as alone as he ever had. But, he learns, this time there are others who are alone with him, and even that promise is something to cling to. 

He hears of people who marry without their soulmarks matching, he knows people give their love to someone who shares a mark that’s not returned. He sees those, like himself, who have nothing to offer at all and those who do not so much as try to hide it. He sees it in their eyes, in the way they walk, in the posture he knows to mirror his own. He feels it in their touch, as their skin brushes his own, as he falls asleep beside strangers who, should he ask despite having seen and touched, would say they were as vacant as he.

He spends many nights thinking of what Yuko had told him when they were younger, had continued to tell him as they grew older. How love was made, and decided by the heart and not by fate. He starts to think that perhaps he might be more free than he’d ever thought, and his chest starts to feel lighter. There’s nothing about him that is broken, but rather every piece of his heart is something he can carve for himself.

Perhaps love is something once can decide, he considers, and perhaps its shape need not be human.

🌿

When he returns home, Yuko cries. She has a baby balanced on her hip, a toddler tugging the hem of her yukata as she pulls Adashino into a hug. She smiles, she sobs and laughs at once, she asks him to tell her everything in the years she’s missed with him.

“I’d like to meet your partner, first,” he tells her, ashamed, and allows himself to pull away. He traces the line of her soulmark with his eyes, and instead of the sorrow he once knew, he feels joy. He feels it radiating off Yuko in waves, so potent he wonders if he might become drunk from the feeling, and smiles. He wants to know that feeling, he wants to understand it.

He sits with their family that night--Yuko, her two children, and her husband Futoshi, and drinks tea from the cup he’d gifted his friend over a decade before. Adashino hears the love in Yuko’s voice when she speaks of her children, her husband, and all the love he returns to her as they share with Adashino the lives they’ve grown while he was away. Adashino starts to think that maybe he could be content with this feeling, simply being near it and letting it slide into his chest by proxy.

He falls asleep on their floor, feeling peace begin to trickle into all the empty spaces of his heart.

🌿

He plants a maidenhair sapling outside his home that spring; it’s a home on the edge of the village in which he was born and a short jaunt away from Yuko. He waters the small tree with care, deciding that in its shape blooms the start of something wonderful. He knows it won’t grow large or flower for many years, but believes that perhaps such a point makes it all the more worthwhile. He will cultivate it, as he has decided to cultivate other things, and Adashino offers the sapling all the dedication of his matchless heart.

Quickly life moves around him, families grow, days and seasons and years pass by before he can blink. He forgets how bare his skin is, as the sun rises and sets and the sky moves on over head. Adashino feels comfort, looking across the water, settling into his porch and the village he never thought he could love the way he’d allowed himself to.

He passes his time filling himself with all the things he could never know, throws his heart into study in a way that leaves many shaking their heads. He becomes known for it, the things he brings in and the things he gives away, and the things he chooses to keep to himself. 

Love is something that is chosen as well, he tells himself, chosen with each passing moment and decided with dedication even when it hurts beyond anything else he’s known. Its form is varied, ever-changing, but he makes a space for the feeling in his heart and keeps it safe. He loves, perhaps, the spaces of universe in place of another, staying up late and reading volumes of work brought from all corners of the world. He reads his books alone, catalogues curiosities by himself, and watches the world index itself on his shelves, brought in the hands of merchants and traders and storytellers to his door.

Secretly he still wishes, during the darkest corners of the night as he sits by himself, that one of the people in that great, wide world might love him back.

🌿

He walks to the village one morning and nearly trips over a stranger, feet outstretched, half-asleep along the shore. He starts awake, and the pair stare at each other in surprise, neither one certain who ought to speak first.

Adashino feels himself sweating, despite the cold air, meeting eyes with the vagrant before him. “Good… morning,” he tries, and bows his head to hide the embarrassment blooming across his cheeks.

The man rubs his eyes _\--eye_ , Adashino winces, for he only has one--and runs a hand through snow-white hair. “Good morning,” he answers, as though any part of this is entirely normal. “Do you live around here?”

Adashino wants to laugh, but something in the seriousness of the other man’s face lets him keep his composure. He forgets for a moment how he’d nearly tripped over him, how the man had been sleeping along the shoreline as though it were a bed of his own. “Yes, I live just up the road.”

“I’m looking for someone,” the traveller explains, “I’m wondering if you know where this person could be found? You may know of them.” Adashino realises he’s dressed strangely, full shoes upon his feet and a western-style outfit of a collared tunic and trousers. He’s unusually pale, but he speaks with no accent to give away his origin.

“I could try,” he hums, wondering how well he actually knows those in the village. He’s seen many of them, and will see many more, but some faces blur and some families are too large for the doctor to recall all their names, no matter how frequent they visit. “What do you know of them?”

The stranger stretches and stands, lighting a cigarette as he rolls his shoulders. Adashino traces the lines of his body, the way his clothes drape, and wonders where he came from. “I’m looking for a private collector,” the stranger says. “Some colleagues of mine sent me in this direction, telling me there’s a doctor who has an interest in…” his eyebrows pinch, and he casts his single eye to Adashino as he decides on his words. He seems to be weighing his trust. “I’m looking for a doctor who collects oddities,” he concludes simply.

Adashino feels himself begin to smile. “How pleasant,” he says, keeping his voice neutral as joy bleeds into his face. “I know exactly the man you’re looking for. He lives just up this way. In fact, we can walk together to his home, if it suits you.”

The stranger hums and nods, chewing on his cigarette and shouldering a large, wooden pack. “Thank you,” he offers. “I’d appreciate that.”

His words, though Adashino cannot tell himself why, make his chest feel so incredibly full. His trip to the village is forgotten.

🌿

The man calls himself Ginko, and introduces himself as a mushi-shi. Adashino is not sure what to make of him, a man who travels around healing ailments the doctor has never heard of, chasing off creatures he can’t even see, but it seems so very right and true. He thinks that if one’s love can mark another’s skin, then perhaps these things that Ginko can see must also be a part of this world, another enigma Adashino wants to chase and catalogue and understand. He asks Ginko to come back, to tell him more, to show him this part of the world he’d been blind to before the other man had told him of it.

He trusts this near-stranger more than he maybe should, and he’s not sure why. There’s something warm in this voice and Adashino lets himself sink into it. Perhaps he sinks too deeply, as when the man leaves with the sunset, the doctor finds himself feeling empty for the first time in years.

🌿

It’s not until his sixth visit that Adashino catches the other man’s mark, shockingly dark, on his skin. His stomach rolls, lungs expanding and shrinking all at once as he catalogues what he sees. He had been beginning to wonder if he’d found someone else like himself, someone bare, and he drops his tea set in surprise as he’s crossing to the porch when he realises how wrong he was.

He’s not sure why, but something sits tight in his stomach at the sight of it. He feels himself shaking. His shoulders tighten as Ginko sits, unaware, head craned up to look lazily at the clouds passing by, cigarette balanced between his teeth as-always. 

Adashino takes a step back, away from the glassware he’d dropped, and stumbles back to retrieve a fresh set of serving china. His breath comes in gasps, and he can’t tell himself why. He thinks of standing in the ocean, holding a shell in one hand and a stick in the other, of ice running into his lungs before he was old enough to understand what it was.

The silhouette of a leaf, drawn against the side of Ginko’s neck, has burned itself into the backs of Adashino’s eyelids. He tries to rub it away as he makes a fresh pot of tea, but no matter how much he pushes, he still sees it when he blinks. And yet it doesn’t quite feel like a betrayal, doesn’t quite feel like sorrow. He feels jealous, instead, that the wandering man has someone who might seek after his heart so fondly their passion burned itself onto his skin.

He hates how he wants to be that person, and lets himself burn alive with the feeling.

🌿

He can’t stop thinking about it. He lets his tongue move on its own.

“Someone must care for you very much, for you to wear that through all your travels,” Adashino says one evening, legs swinging off his porch as he lets the warmth of the summer sun sink into his skin. He can hear crickets beginning to chirp, growing louder as the sky grows darker. He feels nervous, but if his friend notices he says nothing of it.

Ginko laughs beside him, a warm sound to rival the season’s heat. “I’d thank them, if I knew I’d ever meet them.” He exhales smoke into the evening, one hand coming up to touch the mark on his neck. It sits just below the high collar of his white shirt, hidden until he folds the fabric down or he turns too sharply. There is something sad in his voice, something resigned. “I try not to think about it too much. It wasn’t always there, so I keep waiting for it to disappear again.”

Adashino shrugs, and he feels the words leave his mouth before he can stop them. “If it goes away, at least you knew it for a time. I’ve never had one at all.” 

He’s never said it aloud before, not to anyone. Not to his parents, not to Yuko, not even to himself as he lies alone on his futon. He doesn’t know why, but he expected the words to be heavy; instead, they are light, like he’s setting something free. Perhaps he is.

He expects sadness in Ginko’s gaze, but when the other man tilts his head over, there’s a light in his eye that seems like an amnesty Adashino didn’t know he’d needed. “Do you think that’s unfortunate?”

His words do not sound sad, they do not sound patronizing. Adashino finds himself staring, trying to reconcile the words with their tone.

“I used to,” he admits. He looks away, a heat in his ears that had been building since he’d started drinking. “Not so much, anymore. It took me years. I think it’s a kind of freedom, now.” When he says it, this time he believes himself. “Love is something to be chosen, I think.”

Ginko smiles, and looks down towards the village. “Good,” he nods. “I couldn’t stand to see you pity yourself. It doesn’t suit you at all.”

Adashino laughs, and takes another sip of sake. While Ginko looks away he takes the chance to stare, and finds it funny to see how the mark on his neck matches the leaves of the sapling sprouting in the shadow of his home.

🌿

Adashino isn’t sure exactly how much time passes him by, but the familiarity of the irregularity grows in his heart. His collection also grows, although the doctor rapidly finds that such a thing is not the first reason he starts to look forward to Ginko’s visits anymore.

Sometimes the other man doesn’t bring anything with him at all, simply himself and his strange box. Adashino loves these visits just as much as the others, though he pretends to be annoyed all the same that there are no curiosities for him to scrutinize. At times, he wants to laugh when he finds himself thinking that perhaps Ginlo himself is the curiosity he’d wanted all along. He has in his heart one treasure he’ll never admit he’s collected, one he’s decided to keep safe in all its precious moments.

Ginko shares with him stories of creatures that move the wind, of small beings that can grant life and take it away. The mushi-shi tells of rain, of drought, of midnights that stretch for days and of forests that never end, of roads that end too soon. Adashino is enraptured by these tales, each time he hears something new, and he hears in each one of love and pain and desire and regret. He sees his own heart in each story, between every line the other man speaks, and he wonders just how many of these lives understand how deeply they’d been touched, and at once how gently. 

Adashino feels warm when he thinks about how he, of all of these souls, is the one the mushi-shi returns to time and time again by choice, the mark Ginko wears on his skin perhaps irrelevant to his actions in the end. He holds that feeling close, and his jealousy at last fades when he lets Ginko go.

🌿

He lies awake one night on the wood of his porch, smoking and taking sips of sake as the moon rises overhead, and thinks back to when he was younger. Much younger, sitting along the shore and weaving broken nets together, a scowl on his face. He laughs at himself, at how he’d scoffed at the little girl who had offered him advice. He wonders if he owes her an apology, a concession to the wrongness he’d sniped at her in his naivety. 

He wishes for a moment he could go back, could stand beside his younger self, clap a hand on his shoulder, and assure him that not all kinds of love are decided. Some can be made, and others still may never be seen in skin. He wishes he could tell his younger self of all the love he’s known that will never be traced in ink: his studies, his friends, his patients, even the too-small maidenhair tree he prunes and waters with care. The white-haired mushi-shi who visits him on a calendar Adashino will never know how to read.

And then Adashino wonders, that if perhaps he were to reconcile this understanding when he was younger, would he have taken the time he had to learn the love the way he had? He smiles, closes his eyes, and decides only that he owes Yuko an apology. Love can be made, it can be cultivated, it can be chosen time and time again.

🌿

Seasons change and villagers come and go, but Adashino stays. He waits for something, for someone, he’s not even sure he means to. But the other man comes back, like the tide or the wind or the spring, although in his absence Adashino knows there’s no vacancy or hollow of sadness to take his place: only a warmth, like sunshine and sake, redoubled whenever he sees Ginko’s silhouette wandering along the shoreline at last. He waves with a vigor that does not change as years trickle on, and Ginko, as ever, offers in return a simple nod of his head.

🌿

Adashino falls asleep one evening with his head on the porch, and wakes up to a jacket draped over his shoulders. It smells of the forests, and of clear air, and under it all there’s a sharpness of tobacco that he still crinkles his nose at even after years of knowing it. He sits up and wonders when this friendship became so familiar, so intimate he is not surprised to see Ginko sitting inside, one of Adashino’s bowls balanced in one hand as he reads and eats and waits for the sun to come fully up. His stare is familiar too, the corner of his eye crinkling as he offers a tease to his friend. Adashino straightens his hair and shakes his head, half the world blurry but everything feeling so terribly warm. He laughs at himself and then stands, hanging up Ginko’s coat in the entryway next to his own. It belongs nowhere else for now, he thinks, nor would he have it be any other way.

He does not think of a mark that lies between his shoulders, just out of sight, a silhouette of the village he knows like the back of his hand. He cannot think of it as he does not know of it, will perhaps never know; its lines exist like a river of golden light that lies invisible under his feet, its shape like stars that are swallowed by the light of the sun.

Its form was decided, chosen, deliberated in the spaces of the night, in the months apart, cultivated in silence and solitude and between the steps of worn-out trails. Its silhouette had formed itself in the warmth of the sun, evenings on the porch, cups of tea passed between words and grins and fingertips nearly brushing. Its shadow stained his skin after a well-worn ache gave way to relief, a wave from a hill returned with a nod, a feeling almost like home offered to a man whose heart had once only known distance.

It is tended with care, cherished in silence, chosen and decided and freely given just as freely and secretly as it is returned. 

In that silence, in that resolution of tender quiet, Adashino may never know how deeply, even during the darkest corners of the night as he sits by himself, that there is a person in that great, wide world who loves him back.

He is happy for it all the same.

**Author's Note:**

> 🌿 Thank u to [Sorin](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/bladedwingsandclaws) for helping me decide on how I wanted to end this fic-- yelling abt it was super appreciated!!!!  
> 🌿 Literally anyone [come yell about this AU to me on tumblr ](https://jaxtonstrash.tumblr.com/)cause I have other ideas for it that didn't make it into this fic. talk to me about yearning or talk to me about how Ginko prolly doesn't know how to make any food besides egg over rice 🍲
> 
> 🌿 A/N on a more serious note, I have a lot of deep feelings about connection, love, the perceived value of relationships, and the deepness of human emotion. I've had a few conversations w people about things like paired souls, past lives, etc... in many ways, I do firmly believe that love is something that is decided and dedicated to. While fate may exist, I believe that in the least, soulmates are something that we can make and choose. I choose to love someone, and I choose to love them every day. This is my own free will, my own heart.  
> 


End file.
